Biden warns 'there will be no NATO' if Trump wins re-election

[RHMerriman]

[link:https://www.politico.com/story/2019/07/05/biden-trump-nato-1399009|]

“What bothers me abroad is, look, the idea that we can go it alone with no alliances for the next 20 or 30 years is a disaster,” Biden, the Democratic front-runner to challenge Trump in next year’s general election, told CNN's Chris Cuomo.

“I come out of a generation where we were trying to be the policemen of the world. We can't go in every place. We need allies,” Biden said. “He is absolutely dissing them. He's embracing thugs. He’s embracing Kim Jong Un, who is a thug. He's embracing Putin, who is a flat dictator.”

Biden also accused Trump of “stiff-arming our friends” on the world stage and “threatening NATO,” the decades-old multinational political and military alliance among 29 North American and European countries.

The US went to war twice in the Twentieth Century because of the threat of a despotic state controlling Europe, and has helped maintain the peace for seven decades through the Alliance.

Trump's instability, stupidity, and willingness to do the bidding of Putin's government is a huge threat to peace in the world.

Glad someone is talking about it...

[RHMerriman]

1. Good points regarding Korea...

In his interview with CNN, Biden also criticized the administration’s diplomatic tack toward North Korea as not advancing U.S. interests and failing to extract sufficient concessions from leader Kim Jong Un’s nuclear-ambitious regime.

Trump last week became the first sitting U.S. president to foot in the isolated, communist state, with the aim of launching a new round of arms control negotiations with Kim’s government.

“He gave Kim everything that he wanted: legitimacy,” Biden said, charging that Trump “ended our relationship as a practical matter” with Japan and South Korea and pierced the “united front” shared by the U.S. and the democratic Asian nations.

Biden claimed that Kim “hasn't done a thing” to take concrete steps toward denuclearization, and pledged as president to demand greater accountability from Pyongyang before relieving any economic penalties.

“I'd make it real clear: ‘Look, you want to talk, you want to deal with us, you want sanctions lifted? Show me something ahead of time. Show me.’” Biden said, adding: “They're sitting there with missiles that have capacity and nuclear capacity right now. So they're not giving up anything.”

[emmaverybo]

2. No other candidate has foreign policy creds nor do they seem interested in the world at large

and the crisis we are in. Although NATO is not a hot button primary issue, it is one of the most
important issues of our time.

[RHMerriman]

3. Yeah, there's a lot of focus on domestic policies and priorities, but

Yeah, there's a lot of focus on domestic policies and priorities, but very little on the threats from Russia and China, the realities of the forever war in Southwest Asia, and the simple truth that the international system exemplified by NATO is under attack.

I just checked another candidate's site for their foreign policy plank and it was pretty underwhelming.